


Little Birdhouse in Your Soul

by walkingsaladshooter



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (In the Form of Pie), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Pushing Daisies Fusion, F/M, Fluff, Food Porn, One Shot, Piemaker Rey, Revived Ben, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:28:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22337071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/walkingsaladshooter/pseuds/walkingsaladshooter
Summary: Rey Johnson is twenty-three years, five months, two weeks, three hours, fifty-six minutes, and ten seconds old when she taps Ben Solo’s nose and brings him back to life.A Pushing Daisies AU for crossingwinter.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 58
Kudos: 203





	Little Birdhouse in Your Soul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/gifts).



> (I didn't tag Major Character Death because like... he immediately comes back y'all. This is Pushing Daisies. All good feels all the time.) For maximum effect, please listen to [this](https://youtu.be/oBuvBPpmVJ0) on repeat while reading, and imagine Jim Dale voicing the narration.
> 
> For [crossingwinter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/works), whom I love.

Rey Johnson is twenty-three years, five months, two weeks, three hours, fifty-six minutes, and ten seconds old when she taps Ben Solo’s nose and brings him back to life. His dark amber eyes widen as he gasps in a breath.

She smiles. “Hi, Ben.”

Rey was twenty-three years, five months, two weeks, three hours, and fifty-four minutes old when she waved to Ben across the street. He grinned at her, as happy to see her as she was to see him. And with good reason.

For two glorious years of their childhood, Rey and Ben had lived next door to each other. Though Ben was five years older, and consequently thought himself much wiser, Rey was the one who had designed the secret code of flashlight signals they used to talk across the lawn when they ought to have been in bed. After long summer days of rescuing worms and building stick boats at the creek, as children do, the flicker of light from Ben’s window was an anchor for Rey’s nights. Even now, her apartment is quite near the train line, and Rey isn’t bothered by the noise when the flashing lights through her bedroom window remind her of a beloved friend and a beloved time.

She was giddy with the prospect of seeing him again after so many years. So was he, which is perhaps why he didn’t see the bus when he stepped into the street.

At least he died smiling.

Fortunately, Rey was quick. She scurried into the street, tapped his nose, and now he gasps in a breath.

“Hi, Ben.”

Dazed, but pleased, he grins up at her. “Hi, Rey.”

“Are you alright?”

He furrows his brow quizzically. “Yes. Which is strange. Considering I just got hit by a bus.”

If he also finds it strange that Rey doesn’t help him up, he doesn’t say so. “Let’s get that coffee,” she says. “I have so much to tell you.”

And so it is over two cups of coffee and a plate of cranberry-almond biscotti at Perkatory that she tells Ben that he did, in fact, die.

He blinks. “Excuse me?”

“You did,” Rey says again. “You know. Die.” He gapes at her, so she uses her coffee cup and a piece of biscotti to recreate the moment of his demise. “With the bus.”

“Am I still dead?”

“Oh, no. You’re completely alive.” She smiles at him, a bit sheepish but quite pleased. “I brought you back.”

“You brought me back?”

“Yes. I tapped your nose and—”

“You tapped my nose?”

“I don’t remember you being such a parrot when we were kids.”

“It’s a new thing I’m trying,” he deadpans. “Rey, this doesn’t make sense.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Remember how I moved away so suddenly? Because my parents died?” Ben nods. “Well… it was more complicated than that.”

———

Rey Johnson was seven years, four months, two weeks, nine hours, and thirty-three seconds old when she brought her mother back to life.

Unlike her resurrection of Ben Solo many years later, it was not intentional. Seven-year-old Rey did not yet know the peculiar gift she possessed.

It all happened quite quickly. Her mother, while pouring a glass of fruit punch, dropped dead of a sudden and unexpected aneurysm. Young Rey, alarmed and confused, reached out and touched her mother’s cheek—

And her mother gasped in a breath, filled with life once more.

Too relieved to question this new-found ability, Rey happily returned to her worm rescue mission while her mother returned to the fruit punch—until, exactly sixty seconds later, in the next room, her father dropped dead, too.

This was how Rey learned the first rule of her gift: if she brings someone or something back to life for more than a minute, someone else dies to even the scales.

She learned the second rule that night when her mother tucked her into bed and tearfully kissed her cheek—only to drop stone-cold dead again. Rey tried to bring her back, but to no avail.

So goes the second rule: if she brings someone back, she can never touch them again, or they’ll die, this time for good.

———

“So…” Ben’s fingers flex on the tabletop next to his cup of coffee. “I can’t touch you?”

Rey bites her lip and shakes her head.

“After sixteen years? I can’t—can’t even hug you?” His gaze falls to her hand, curled around the handle of her own coffee cup. “Can’t even hold your hand?”

Rey thinks. “If I wore gloves,” she says. “Then you could hold my hand.” She blinks, seeming to hear herself suddenly. Her cheeks flush, a more subdued shade of the cranberries in her biscotti. “If you wanted to.”

When Ben smiles at her, Rey thinks she’s never seen anything so devastatingly handsome and sweet in her twenty-three (plus change) years. “I would want to.”

When Rey smiles back at him, Ben thinks he can’t understand how he’s lived (and died, and lived again) for the past sixteen years without seeing such a glorious expression turned his way every day. “Good. Because—well, since you’ve moved here, now, I was hoping we could do this more often.”

“Get hit by buses?”

“Get coffee.” She tilts her head at him charmingly. “You could come to The Pie Hole. Guaranteed coffee on the house.”

“The pie hole?”

“My pie shop.” When she grins at him again, Ben questions the validity of biology, as his heart feels less like contracting muscle and more like a flock of bluebirds taking flight. “You haven’t lived until you’ve had my four-berry pie.”

And when Ben quirks an eyebrow at her and smirks, Rey thinks maybe she’s the one who just died, since her soul feels so light and bright it just might be rising out of her body. “And here I thought I’ve lived twice.”

———

Rose Tico has always prided herself on being goal-oriented. She knows what she wants, and she’s not afraid to go after it. So she’s always careful to arrange her delivery schedule so that The Pie Hole is her last stop of the afternoon, giving her time to linger for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie.

“You know,” she says, unloading a crate of past-their-prime strawberries into The Pie Hole’s kitchen, “I’ve never understood what Rey wants with all this squashy fruit.”

“Compost, I think,” Finn says off-handedly. “It’s cheap as hell, and it makes her garden happy.”

“Whatever works.” Rose hands him the clipboard to sign, then peers out into the front of the shop. It’s nearly empty. “What do you say? Seems quiet. Want to split a slice of banana-caramel-walnut with me?”

The Pie Hole’s best, and only, waiter groans. “Rose Tico, you’re speaking my language.”

So she scurries around the shop and back into a booth seat as quickly as she can, squashy strawberries long forgotten. For in fact, she does not make The Pie Hole her last stop for the sake of a slice of pecan pie, though the pecan pie is, in fact, delicious. She makes it her last stop because she is hopelessly in love with Finn.

They’re sitting together, smiling across the booth and sharing a creamy, crunchy, syrupy slice of banana-caramel-walnut pie, when the piemaker enters her shop with a very tall, very dark, very broad man in tow.

Rey Johnson is beaming. “Finn—Rose, hi—this is Ben.”

Finn’s eyebrows rise. “Childhood friend Ben?”

“The one and only.”

“Hey.” Ben shakes Finn’s hand, then Rose’s. “I just moved here, so Rey and I thought—”

“—why not touch base?” She smiles up at him, and Rose can immediately tell that Rey is at least as hopelessly in love with Ben as Rose is with Finn. “It’s been so long.”

Ben smiles down at her. Oh. He’s hopelessly in love with her, too. “How long?” she asks.

“Sixteen years,” Ben and Rey say at the same time. They glance at each other, him smiling, her nearly giggling. Oh boy.

Rose Tico can, she will admit, get caught up in her own feelings sometimes, perhaps to the detriment of her observational skills. But right now she is keenly observing that, for all their obvious love, Rey and Ben are standing a good twenty-four inches away from each other. Rey’s hands are clasped behind her back, Ben’s are in his pockets, but they both look positively incandescent.

“It’s great to meet you,” she says to Ben. “I’m Rose, this is Finn. He’s the—”

“Waiter,” says Finn.

“And I’m the—”

“Delivery person,” says Rey. She turns her smile on Rose. “Best delivery person. Always finds me the squashiest fruit.”

Ben’s broad brow crinkles in perplexion. “Why do you want squashy fruit?”

“Compost,” says Finn, at the exact same moment that Rey says, “Jam.”

Rose raises her eyebrows to join Ben’s, and Rey quickly adds, “Only squashy ones go to jam. Moldy ones go to compost.”

“I see.”

And then Rey is beaming at Ben like the sun once more. “You’re not too full of biscotti, are you? You’ve got to try the four-berry.” It would be perfectly natural, Rose thinks, for her to reach out and take Ben’s hand to lead him to the counter. She entirely expects her to. But Rey does not reach for Ben’s hand; her hands stay clasped behind her back, and his stay in his pockets, as he follows her, asking, “Which four berries do you use?”

At the sound of Finn’s low whistle, Rose turns back to him. “Those two are pretty gone for each other, huh?”

Watching Finn lick the sticky remains of caramel off his fork, Rose lets her chin fall into her hand. “Uh-huh.”

For all her goal-oriented qualities, there are some arenas of life in which she is not so brave.

———

Minutes become hours, hours become days, and days become weeks. Ben, who is a writer, brings his work with him to The Pie Hole more and more often. Not only is the colorful decor—including innumerable vases of living flowers, which never seem to be changed out and also never seem to die, which suggests to him perhaps Rey was the one to cut and arrange them—enough to keep him in good spirits, but Rey makes good on her promise of free coffee, which fuels his work.

Furthermore, he’s made it his personal mission in life to sample every pie flavor on The Pie Hole’s menu, which is no small feat.

Rey has always been astonishing in her creativity and resourcefulness. As children, she was capable of turning a simple twig into a dozen different games, entrancing Ben for hours even when he was into his double digits and surely too old for her particular play. None of that has left her.

From his usual booth, he can see across the counter into The Pie Hole’s kitchen. Rey is magical, cubing cold butter and macerating peaches. She is gloriously focused when she rolls out the pie dough. She is astonishingly sweet when she plucks sprigs of lavender for her lavender-plum pie. She is a terrible singer when she sings whatever song is looping in her head as she works, but the off-key, garbled notes only make Ben’s heart swell with joy.

If it is dramatic for him to call her his muse, then he will be dramatic.

As she tests new recipes, which she is incessantly doing, Rey brings slices to his booth, pushing a plate and fork across the table with stars in her eyes and an expectant smile.

Ben Solo can do nothing else in the world but try every slice she places before him.

The Pie Hole’s menu has many classic standards, each more delicious than the last. Apple, blueberry, cherry, blackberry. Pecan, lemon meringue, key lime, pumpkin. Banana cream, peanut butter chocolate silk. Something called vinegar pie, which is crisp on top and achingly sweet in the middle, and which Rey insists is a traditional recipe for all that Ben has never heard of it.

But, never content, Rey is ever pushing the envelope.

The lavender-plum pie is peculiar, but surprisingly enchanting. The four-berry pie is sweet and tart and addicting. The bacon-bourbon-apple pie is well-intentioned, but ultimately overbearing. (Rey, never content, continues toying with the recipe, insisting she’ll get it right.) The coconut cream mango pie is delicate and fresh.

Today, when she pushes a slice of black forest pie across the table, Ben asks her, “Why don’t you ever taste your pies yourself?”

Rey glances around, then leans in closer. “The rotted fruit,” she whispers. “It’s much cheaper than fresh. And if I touch it—”

“—it’s fresh as new.”

She nods. “But then I can’t touch it again. I wear gloves for the rest of the process. And if I ate it…” She scrunches up her face. Ben mirrors the expression in sympathy.

Her hands are resting on the table. Ben notices, in the way he notices everything about Rey, that she’s still wearing the gloves that prevent her from sending her freshly revived fruit back into a state of decay. Hesitantly, like a man fording a river when he’s not entirely sure how deep it is, which is rather how Ben feels when it comes to Rey and his own heart, he reaches his hand across the table and rests it an inch from hers.

“I wish you could taste them,” he says, looking into her eyes. “Your pies are delicious, Rey.”

In that moment, Ben Solo makes a decision: biology is indeed a flawed science, made up by fools who have never been in love. For not only is his heart a flock of bluebirds, but, as Rey smiles at him with eyes so soft he can scarcely stand it, surely his blood is, in fact, made of the very same cherries and chocolate making up the slice of pie in front of him, for he’s never in all his years felt this sweet.

With the tentative gentleness of a butterfly slipping free of its chrysalis, Rey lifts her gloved hand and gently lays her fingers over his.

———

  
  


Finn Jackson is twenty-five years, ten months, one week, four days, and two hours old when he looks out from the kitchen of The Pie Hole and sees Rey place her gloved hand on Ben Solo’s much larger hand. “Oh boy,” he says.

Rose tilts her head inquisitively as she hands Finn the last crate of peaches. “What’s oh boy?”

He jerks his own head in the direction of the cafe. “Those two.”

Rose peers out, then whirls around with a blush. “Do you think they’ll finally kiss?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Finn turns to stack the crate of peaches with the others, as well as to hide his expression from Rose. He’s not known for being the best of liars, but he did promise Rey to keep her secret. He knows quite well why the piemaker has yet to kiss the broad-chested writer.

“I hope they do,” Rose says wistfully. “It’s awful not be kissed when you really want to.”

“Right,” Finn says, ducking his head and scribbling his signature on the delivery sheet.

———

  
  


With each passing day that Ben spends in The Pie Hole, he learns more and more about the other regulars.

There’s the ginger-haired man with a face like soured milk who always orders one slice of four-berry pie, eats it slowly without speaking to anyone, and tips exactly eighteen percent to the penny.

There’s the group of friends who squish into a booth, order an entire pie of whatever the day’s special is, and share it with their forks right out of the tin. The leader—for all groups have a leader, even if they deny it’s so—has sparkling brown eyes, hair that curls charmingly over his forehead, and always has a dazzling smile for Rey. Ben is not proud that he glowers at the charming man, but glower he does.

There’s the willowy woman with lavender hair who always reads a book, sips a cup of coffee, and eats her slice of pie with her hand, favoring varieties that hold together well for, one supposes, precisely that reason.

And there are the girlfriends, one quiet and serious-looking with hair always in two golden buns, the other effusive and warm with dark hair and dark eyes, who share their slices of pie and gaze into each other’s eyes, holding hands under the table and sometimes kissing over their forks.

It’s this last pair that Ben watches the most. Not out of any sense of misplaced voyeurism, but simply because he feels his heart swell at the simple act of a simple kiss.

There are many things Ben would give to kiss Rey over their forks as they share a slice of pie. But to do so would take his life, which is the one thing he will not give, because then he wouldn’t be able to kiss her a second time. And if there’s one thing Ben knows, it’s that Rey deserves as many kisses as possible.

“Oh, that’s good.” He turns to his laptop and feverishly types. “You deserve… as many kisses… as possible. There. Solid end to that chapter.” Then he sits back in the booth, runs his hand through his hair, and looks over to the kitchen.

He can just see Rey inside, singing poorly and mixing apples with brown sugar.

Ben Solo is twenty-eight years, eight months, four days, ten hours, and nine minutes old when he makes a decision.

He is not a man of learning. He is not a man of charm. But he is a man of passion.

He’s at the kitchen door in moments.

Rey turns to him. Her face as it lights up puts every Christmas tree to shame and makes Ben’s passionate heart beat even harder in his chest. “Hello, Ben. I wasn’t bothering you with my singing, was I?”

“No. Never. You never bother me. I love your singing.”

Her face, to which Ben would scribe sonnet upon sonnet if only he had a gift for poetry, crinkles adorably in questioning. “Then what is it?”

Ben is a man of passion, and he also is a man of action.

He steps in quite close to her, picks up the plastic wrap Rey has been using to keep her pie dough from drying out, and pulls free a long piece. It stretches between them like a window, and as Rey’s pretty eyes widen, Ben leans in and kisses her through the plastic.

At that moment, one-point-six miles across town, the ginger-haired man burns his fingertips as he takes a teabag out of a cup of tea without using a spoon. Four streets over, the friend group is just revealing the surprise birthday party they’ve planned for their charming leader. Behind The Pie Hole, Finn Jackson is truly looking at Rose Tico for the first time and feeling a strange fluttering begin in his stomach.

In the kitchen of The Pie Hole, surrounded by flour and sugar and apples and cream, Rey Johnson feels Ben Solo’s lips against hers for the first time, tempered only by the stretch of warm plastic wrap between them.

When they pull apart and Ben lowers the plastic, gazing into each other’s eyes, Rey says, “Move in with me.”

“What?”

“Move in with me. We’ll live together above The Pie Hole. It’s perfect—you’re always here anyway.”

He grins at her in the disarming way he does. “I am always here.” His smile fades into a worried frown. “What if we run into each other?”

“Easy. If we’re coming around a corner or through a doorway, we call out.”

“What about sleeping?”

“Separate beds, but in the same room. We each get a body pillow so we can smile across the gap and know we’re really holding each other.”

This time when Ben smiles, it’s quite soft. “What about when I want to hold your hand?”

She smiles in return. “We’ve already been quite creative with gloves and plastic wrap. I’m sure we’ll manage.” And to prove it, she turns sideways to him. Her hands, as always, are behind her back so as not to accidentally touch him; she tenderly takes one hand in the other, clasping them together like lovers would, smiling into his eyes all the while.

Rey sees the moment it clicks. He places his hands behind his back as well, curling them together as gently as ever he could.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll move in with you, Rey.”

It is, perhaps, time for her to call the electric company and cancel her service. She knows she could power the entire Pie Hole by the wattage of the smile she gives him in return.

———

Rey Johnson, the piemaker with the unusual gift, is twenty-three years, eleven months, two days, and six minutes old when, across the gap between beds in the bedroom they share, she first tells Ben Solo she loves him.

And Ben Solo, whose heart beats in his chest only because of, and only for, Rey, smiles and warmly tells her, “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. Don't be afraid to come say hi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/nuanceismyjam), [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/nuanceismyjam), or [Tumblr](http://nuanceismyjam.tumblr.com/)! (Which I use in that order, in terms of frequency.)


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